Tagworld, the next generation Myspace competitor, is showing that there is plenty of room for growth in the crowded teen/young adult home page market (previous TechCrunch posts on Tagworld are here).
First, they’ve closed $7.5 million series A round of financing led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Note: competitor Tagged announced a $7 million financing led by Mayfield in February 2006.
This comes as Tagworld hits an important milestone – 1 million members and counting since their launch on November 11, 2005. while this is still just a drop in the Myspace bucket of 60 odd million members, its still a lot of people using the service after a very short period of time.
Tagworld will be launching a number of new products and partnerships this week as well:
Music Engine
I’ve been asking for Pandora (TechCrunch posts here) to be built into third party music engines for a long time (I’d like to listen to streaming music and occasionally branch off into Pandora discovered similar music at any time.
Tagworld hasn’t partnered with Pandora but they are launching something similar. While listening to music on the Tagworld music player (pop up player or embedded into Tagworld sites), a user can branch off at any time with the click of a button to hear related music – and this includes both big name artists as well as indie’s that are using Tagworld to become noticed.
The engine is powered by user ratings of artists, albums and songs, and individual ratings are weighted according to a number of additional (and proprietary) factors. The result? Listen to the music you like, and branch off to discover new related music at any time.
Music Videos
Tagworld is also launching a new music video product through a partnership with Universal Music Group. Unlike Myspace, which only allows viewing of videos on a Myspace page (and then only in Internet Explorer), Tagworld will allow integration of music videos directly into any Tagworld site, and will work with IE or Firefox.
Initial included artists include 50 Cent, Black Eyed Peas, Gwen Stefani, Kanye West, Nelly, The Killers, Jack Johnson, U2, Fall Out Boy, Snoop Dog, The Bravery and Daddy Yankee.
Classifieds
Tagworld has also released a classifieds area for members. Any member can now build an online store very easily.
Acquisition rumors for Tagworld are already swirling through the valley, although founder Evan Rifkin flatly denies any discussions with acquirors and says that they are focused entirely on building the business now that they’ve raised this round of financing. And while Myspace (and Facebook) continue to dominate the market for teen home pages, the constantly refreshing nature of their customer base (people grow out of Myspace and millions of new teens enter the market every year) means that they must find new ways to “stay cool” and appeal to this fickle market.
Interesting as always, but quick comment: the “Tagworld” link at the top is broken. This might cost them a few thousand hits…
Looking at Alexa, it doesn’t seem like they have too active of a community. I wonder how many of the million signups are legit?
http://www.alex...rl=tagworld.com
Impressive amount of registratrations,
I’d like to know how many daily active users they have.
The population maybe high but it’s incorrect if most of them are dead…
The correct link is http://www.tagworld.com/ not http://www.tagworlds.com
Michael,
Where do you see Tagworld’s value add over Myspace?
-Saul
Ben – Link repaired. Thank you for pointing it out.
techcrunch has as many visitors according to Alexa. The weirder part is that Alexa says that ‘admin.tagworld.com’ accounts for 2% of the overall traffic of the site. At teh same time though Alexa does rank the site at 1,315. Thanks for the tip Sondra, it has me wondering just how much each user on a social network such as this is really worth – I have heard a variety of statistics about how active the MySpace users are, but they are the #2 site by hits on the web.
Does anybody have access to one of the other traffic metric services that can give us more accurate numbers?
Heh, looks like it’s written in ASP.NET. The teen/young adult generation will drive several new fortunes on the web in the years to come.
Nik, while I love nothing more than to look at techcrunch stats on alexa, i do think that the average techcrunch reader is far more likely to have the alexa toolbar installed than a tagworld user…so I don’t think the comparison is fair.
To try and compare apples to apples, see this comparison of tagworld and tagged – http://www.alex....com+tagged.com
Wow. Impressive number. I haven’t taken that good of a look at TagWorld yet because I found it a little buggy last time I tried it out. But that’s great news. It’s got a long way to go before they catch up to MySpace or Facebook though, if at all possible!
Nik, maybe Alexaholic can provide you with some more statistics? Here is a comparison of TagWorld, MySpace, and Facebook traffic. Don’t know how accurate these numbers are, but interesting non the less.
That classifieds area with online stores sounds neat. Should be interesting. I’ll definitely have to take a peak sometime this week.
Nice post, Mike.
Ah, I forgot about tagged as well. Thanks for pointing that out, Mike. That’s another service I have yet to check out. The two seem to be pretty similar traffic wise, except for some random dropping points with Tagged.
just a random note: alexaholic is so great.
Alexaholic is actually a pretty nice tool, check out a full spectrum of the social network sites. It’s pretty clear that both tagged and tagworld haven’t even put a dent in myspace.
Facebook while far lower is aimed at a specific audience and it still attracts many more people than the tag sites.
http://www.alex...ww.facebook.com
Seems like another Friendster in the making. Lots of hype, lots of capital and ultimately, rapid depreciation of value. I would call TagWorld – “Water World”.
Jon – Good one. I never saw that movie actually.
I’m still betting Tagworld has a decent shot at a very large liquidity event. The platform works, it has great features and the founders are aggressive and smart as hell about building the business. Having DFJ on your side is no small thing either.
Michael – you’re not missing out on much.
I think tagworld has got the right idea but I’m just not sure about the execution. How are they going to keep all of those people coming back like a drug (like the way myspace does).
People love myspace because its ghetto and cool and and and … who the hell can really put a finger on it but unless tagworld can sufficiently make it “cool” enough to spread further it can never surpass myspace. For example “myspace” is becoming a dictionary word just like kleenex. (eg: Do you myspace?)
That being said, you dont always have to be the first to succeed, I just dont think tagworld are “cool” enough yet, if you know what I’m saying.
Tagworld has real potential – it addresses (most of) the failing of MySpace, particularly in profile page editing. CSS import? Lovely.
It suffers from two problems at the moment: 1) its very buggy. But as it is a beta then thats to be expected. and 2) its soooooo slow. We’re talking a minute to load each page. Hopefully this $7 investment will be spent on faster/bigger servers, rather than on adding features that will slow it down even more. A complete rewrite in PHP and Ajax would be nice
I also question the number of users. When I accessed Tagworld a few weeks ago I noticed that, even though the site claimed 250,000 users, most of the profiles that came up on a search were the same. It was obvious to me that the numbers were inflated. The Alexa numbers appear to bear this out. Not only that, but according to Alexa, TagWorld’s rank seems to be declining.
Could it be that they are inflating their numbers to get self-fulfilling PR?
BTW, my site, Crisscross, just hit 500 billion users.
Here’s an interesting comparison, TagWorld vs. Bebo, another ‘next gen’ social network:
http://www.alex...ld.com+bebo.com
I’ve registred with Tagworld, but its service is a little overrated if you ask me. Yes, it has some good web 2.0 features, but none of which are great. They need to have something amazing to get people to switch from myspace. Even though it has reached 1 million members, I don’t know a single person who has an account there.
Besides, tagworld is aloot slower than myspace.
Tagworld is definitely a superior solution to myspace – though I find its search function very limited right now – you can only search by age and gender and location. I think some additional options should be included such marital status, etc. The way you can build your site using drag/drop modules is quite unique and very powerful. Unlike myspace, you aren’t limited to one page, you can build multipage websites and with a 1GB of free storage!!!
It’s not clear to me however what their revenue model will be as I see no ads on the site.
As a MySpace user, I really hope Tagworld develops rapidly, takes off somehow, and takes over.
MySpace blows.
Here’s too Tagworld’s success and a massive migration from MySpace.
[quote]Comment by Michael Arrington — March 12, 2006 @ 11:30 pm
just a random note: alexaholic is so great. [/quote]
Sure, if you like bad data and a system that can be cheated.
Alexa is being gamed/cheated, and the data is generated from a specific population of Web users.
Ask anyone who works in the field of stats if Alexa’s data is worth studying, and they would tell you no after finding out how the data is gathered and gamed.
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Mike – please do people a favor and research how poor the data really is, and stop promoting false information.
How would you feel about your posts about a company you promoted on your blog if it was found that they were cheating Alexa?
Want more information:
===================================
Alexa Totally Unreliable? — Business Logs
http://business..._unreliable.php
Why Alexa Ranking Alone is Worthless : SEO Book.com
http://www.seob...es/000034.shtml
Faking Alexa traffic ranking
http://www.tech...raffic-ranking/
Manipulating Alexa Traffic Rankings
http://www.sear...nal.com/?p=3044
http://www.alexasurf.com/
http://alexabooster.com/
=====
I was just blogging about this topic the other day: http://www.gide...m/a/9/blog/697/
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At any rate… don’t you find the alexa ‘reach’ chart for Tagworld to be a bit odd… There’s some strange drops in the data.
For example, if the site is growing, then why is 1/2 of the traffic gone from just two weeks ago? When you look at the ‘reach chart,’ you’ll see that they are currently at where they were last December? How about the dropouts on the ‘rank’ chart?
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At any rate, my main point is that you seem to like Alexa, and I understand that – but I’m concerned about the validity of Alexa data, and the degree of power those charts have. Placing data and charts on a popular blog like TechCrunch is a powerful advertisement for those sites/services being covered. The people who visit this blog expect the content to be true and valid – which is why I’m responding, as there is too much evidence showing that Alexa data is not trustworthy.
It’s imperitive that our references and analytic data is valid if we are going to use them to understand where we are going. If we are to move forward on unproven data, we are only serving those with the most cash in the end.
- Gideon Marken
Friendster is using Pandora, or planning to.
1mm registrations since their launch in August is impressive, but I hope everyone knows that traffic/advertising can easily be purchased on the cpa level, so if you have enough money, you can get enough acquisitions.
Actual usage is another, totally different issue. Tagworld had a feature, several months back, where you could sort users based on activity (which was the sum of posts, pictures, etc.) a realy useful tool to see who was actually using it. They no longer have that, not sure why.
Another activity proxy is the postings on their classifieds section. Classifieds launched about 3 weeks back. When I looked at it a week and a half back, there were 300 items, today there are 800 items . . . from 1 million users?
All Tagworld’s traffic comes from advertising on MySpace editor sites with “Tired of Myspace? Check Tagworld.” It inflates their Alexa numbers, but no one is using the site. Nice job on fooling the investors into forking over the cash, but this site is not as popular as they make it out to be. They’re also spamming users directly on MySpace and paying the spammers for the signups.
This reminds me of livedigital.com
It seems to me that with so many social networking services out there form irc, IM’s, *.blog, myspace and tagworld… it’d be great if people didn’t have to maintain a profile every single one, as new sites are continously being evolved from the ashes of those worn out.
How about someone out there starts a “Universal Internet Profile” (UIP), that is dynamic in field, is tagged, and can be used by all sites that wish to have access, and just need to spider the data base for updates. We’d actually have a coherent database (maybe even a dancing tree) of a lot of people of the web. Very useful and powerful me thinks
Since you are so impressed with their 1 million registrations why don’t you give me a million dollars and I’ll send you names at a $1 CPA all day long. This number means nothing. Why do you think their 1 million members have only listed 850 items in their classifieds? That’s a whopping 1 in 1000 participation rate. Pathetic. If DFJ is funding this I have some fantastic snake skin oil that cures colds that I am willing to sell them at a discount.
Also, TagWorld is running billboards in (at least) Los Angeles which promise to put you or your band on the billboard. How many people sign up just for that chance, then never use the site again?
Myspace is worthless. The TagWorld multiple page thing is good, but a single point is never going to cover a fraction of what’s out there. So what’s the point? Can’t we be happy with many smaller companies? The universal idea might help connect more where it’s an issue.
Although I do love certain features on TagWorld there are a lot of problems with the site. Like right now. I have not been able to get to TagWorld for over an hour. I had been working on a page and it would not upload and so I went out and tried to come back in and have not been able to do so. Also, why are there not dates and times of the comments that are posted to our page, why when you add a friend do they not appear on your Friends page. I was in TagWorld once before and left because there were always problems. Decided to give it another try and it is still the same old nonsense. In MySpace people love to post graphics in the comments. TagWolrd is boring in the fact that people do not do that. They just write a few words and that is it. Makes for a very boring comments page. Well I am done venting for the moment.
Peace and Harmony…..
Tagworld sucks.